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Conference on invasive plants brings together scientists from Asia and North America
By Nancy Weiss
When Yi Li would look out the window of his lab at the University’s Depot Campus, he saw some beautiful plants under the trees. He noticed that the plants were spreading quickly and soon nothing else was growing beneath the trees. Euonymus, or burning bush, was spreading into the woods near the lab and nothing else was growing in its path.
Li, professor in the Department of Plant Science, sees invasive plants, especially burning bush and Japanese barberry, as something akin to the alien blobs in sci-fi movies.
“When you consider the speed at which they spread, you know they are killing native plants. They are reducing biodiversity. After ten, fifty, a hundred years it could be a disaster,” says Li.
But burning bush and Japanese barberry are valuable plants in the nursery industry, so Li and his colleagues at the New England Invasive Plant Center are working to develop noninvasive cultivars. They have bred sterile plants that can be planted by homeowners but will not threaten the native vegetation.
As soon as the plants bred in the laboratory are perfected, they will be released to the nursery business for sale. The invasive plants that dot the landscape will have to be manually removed or treated with chemicals or they will continue to spread.
Concerns about invasive plants inspired an international symposium that convened August 10–14 in Storrs. “Invasive Plants in the Northeast of Asia and America: Trading Problems, Trading Solutions” drew scholars from around the world.
Li credits department head Mary Musgrave with enthusiastically supporting the conference and working with him and John Silander, professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, to develop the program.
“Dr. Musgrave is experienced and skillful at organizing a conference at this level,” Li says.
About seventy participants came to the conference from the temperate regions of Japan, China, South Korea, Russia, and North America. For more than a century, there has been extensive horticultural trade between Asia and North America. While this has added to the rich diversity of the gardens in both regions, certain species, like barberry and bittersweet in North America and goldenrod in Asia, have escaped the bounds of cultivation and now threaten the native flora of both regions.
During the week, participants discussed ecological aspects of plant invasiveness, horticultural breeding and biotechnology, control methods, and regulatory challenges, trading ideas through formal presentations, shared meals, and tours. The goal was to work toward new approaches and ideas to a complex international problem. Scientists and government representatives shared their successes and failures in controlling invasive plants and established a network for developing international collaborative research programs.
The fifteen invited speakers stayed on after the conference and started drafting three review articles on current research on invasive plants in the areas of ecology, policy and regulation, and horticultural breeding and biotechnology. The papers will be published in the journal Invasive Plant Science and Management. |
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